The Wild

by David Zindell

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid to go to sleep at night. And I’m even more afraid of waking up insane.’

  ‘You are not insane.’

  ‘Sometimes, it’s almost as if I don’t know who I am.’

  ‘You are you,’ he said simply. ‘You are … who you are.’

  ‘Sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror, when I look for myself, there’s nothing there. What’s happening to me? Oh, Danlo, Danlo – what will I do?’

  Danlo took her down to the ocean, then. In the shallows at the edge of the beach, he saw to it that she washed the blood from her mouth and hands. He himself laved handfuls of dark, salt water over his cut face. The water was as cold as ice but it burned his flesh like fire. They stood on the hardpack for a long time, shivering and watching the waves come and go. It was a day of grey clouds and a mist so fine that it floated down from the sky like an endless silken robe. Looking out through the early morning mist, Danlo could barely see the shape of Cathedral Rock where it loomed all black and menacing somewhere before him. Somewhere, in this soft and impenetrable mist, there were gulls and other birds, for Danlo heard them crying out as if blinded and lost at sea. Tamara, too, was still crying, not obviously in a spasm of voice and breath, but rather in the deeps of her dark, liquid eyes. She was crying for herself, he thought; as all people do, she was crying for what she might have been, for what she someday still might be.

  After a while, she said, ‘Sometimes, when I’ve stopped sleeping in the morning, I feel as if I’ve died and my waking life is only a dream. Sometimes I wake up, and I’m afraid I’m only awakening to a new phase of the dream, waking up inside the dream, over and over, this hideous, endless awakening. Sometimes I’m afraid there’s no way out.’

  Danlo picked up a flat stone half-buried in the sand and cast it into the ocean. It made a satisfying ‘plop’ and disappeared into the dark water. ‘There is always a way out,’ he said. ‘Or a way … further in.’

  ‘Oh, Danlo – I can’t live this way.’

  Danlo looked for his lightship down the beach, but the mist was so dense and grey that he could not see it. ‘If you would like, I could ready my ship for a journey. We could try to leave this world – I could take you back to Neverness.’

  ‘No, I’ll never leave this world. I can’t, don’t you see?’

  With a snap of his arm, he cast another stone into the water. It skipped three times over the dull, smooth surface before sinking beneath a wave. He looked at her and said, ‘I … do see.’

  ‘I can’t live anywhere else, not like this,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’m dying.’

  ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘It is just the opposite.’

  ‘Sometimes, after one of the dreams, I feel as if I want to die.’ At this, she looked out at the cold water where he had cast his stones. ‘Sometimes I want to walk out into the ocean and drown. If I can’t live as I have, with love, with joy – why should I live at all?’

  ‘Because,’ he said simply, ‘life is everything.’

  ‘Once a time, I thought that too,’ she said. ‘Once I wanted to taste every food grown on every world from Solsken to Farfara. I wanted to see every world in the universe, if I could live long enough. I wanted to go to Kateken and see the singing caves, and to Agathange. I wanted to love every beautiful man I could. I’ve always loved love, and I’ve really lived for nothing else, but how can I love when all I want to do is fall down screaming and die?’

  Danlo moved closer to her and touched the tiny water droplets clinging to the downy hairs along her cheek. ‘Please … live.’

  ‘But I’m not really living, not like this.’

  ‘Then live as you will.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Only you will know,’ he said. ‘But there might be a way … in remembrance.’

  ‘Oh, no – please, no.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘This will be hard for you.’

  ‘You can’t really know.’

  ‘You have often said that you feel incomplete, that you always are on the verge of discovering some great thing about yourself.’

  ‘That’s the theme of all my dreams. That’s the sense I have, you know.’

  ‘I believe that it might help to relive your birth.’

  ‘My birth? But why?’

  ‘Because that is where everything began. That is where the secret of your life must lie.’

  ‘You sound so sure.’

  ‘I … am not sure. In remembrance there are never any certainties.’

  She took hold of his hand and dug her fingernails into the hard callouses that she found there. ‘I was born in my mother’s house – don’t you remember? You’d take me back to that? I don’t know if I could bear to ever see that house again – and I think it would kill me to see my mother.’

  ‘I … would take you back to the moment of your birth,’ he said evasively. For a while he watched her shivering in the cold mist. Although he sensed that this birth would destroy this Tamara that he loved, he did not hesitate to propose a second ceremony of remembrance. ‘I will help you find the way.’

  ‘I’m so afraid.’

  ‘I will not let you die.’

  She was quiet for a moment as she looked into his grave, dark eyes. And then she said, ‘Oh, Danlo – I’m afraid for you, too.’

  Danlo smiled at her, but said nothing. He listened to the moaning of the whales far out at sea, and he did not tell her that he was afraid for both of them, and for all things that had ever suffered the pain of being born.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  She

  If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

  – Jesus the Kristoman, from the Gospel of Thomas

  As before, they prepared for remembrance. They brought fresh flowers into the house and spent several days doing the exercises that Danlo designed. This time, it was only Tamara who would relive a part of her life, and so Danlo would be free to guide her backward through the stages of her ontogenesis from fertilized ovum to adult human being. Therefore, he selected a different sequence of exercises than before. He saw to it that she executed these exercises perfectly. On the evening of her remembrance, he lit the thirty-three candles and sat with her on the floor of the fireroom. He looked about them to make sure that he had left nothing undone. Before them, the rhododendrons were perfectly arrayed in their blue vase. The wooden beams gleamed with golden light, and good smells floated all around them: orange essence and charcoal, warm skin and salt air and silk. It was with a smell, or rather a taste, that Danlo initiated Tamara’s return to the sixty-first attitude of recurrence. After guiding her through many rounds of difficult breathing exercises, he reached into the pocket of his kamelaika and removed a blue vial filled with plain sea water. He opened the vial and held it up to Tamara’s lips. ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘Taste the ocean inside; this is what it was like before you were born.’

  And so Tamara drank a few drams of water that Danlo had scooped up earlier from the ocean outside their house, and Danlo told her that it was time to begin recalling the first conscious memory of her life, which they had previously discussed in great detail. Strangely, this memory also involved sea water. In Tamara’s earliest conscious memory, when she was perhaps four years old, she was sitting alone in the kitchen of her mother’s house. It was a huge kitchen of stone and steel and other hard things, but it was always warm, always full of the smells of mint tea, honey, spices, kurmash and roasting bread. On this snowy winter day, late in the afternoon, Tamara sat on the marble floor playing with jars of water. To her right was a clear jar of distilled water that her mother used in the rather forbidding cleansing ceremonies performed in the facing room deeper in the house. On her left was a blue jar half full of sea water imported from Sahasrara. When Tamara’s mother cooked her huge, steaming potfuls of kurmash on feast days, she always added a little of this rare water to enliv
en the dish and impart the flavour of her family’s home world. But on this unforgettable day out of Tamara’s memory, Tamara was using the water for a different purpose. It was the day when she had first understood death. As a lively and imaginative child, she had always been terrified of dying (sometimes too terrified to sleep at night) and she had always wondered where she would go when light went out of her eyes and the readers of her church took her body away to be burned at the end of the incomprehensible ceremony of vastening. The idea of simply disappearing like the light of an extinguished candle, of never being again – this utter annihilation and neverness of her life was as inconceivable to her as it was terrifying. Most of all, she couldn’t bear the possibility of her love for her mother simply vanishing, for this love was her life, and to be separated forever from her was too terrible to contemplate. So intense was this love that she didn’t realize how much she hated her mother, too, not even when the imperious Victoria One Ashtoreth stormed into the kitchen and caught Tamara playing with her precious water. Tamara, with her little but clever hands, had just succeeded in pouring a quantity of the salt water into the clear jar. She was sipping from this marvellous mixture when her mother saw what she was doing and gasped in astonishment and betrayal. She spoke no words of rebuke; neither did she strike Tamara as any other astrier mother would have done. She only looked at Tamara with her blazing, scornful eyes, and this single look was enough to tear open Tamara’s heart. And so she was never able to tell her mother of her brilliant discovery. She never explained that when salt water was poured into the clear jar, it vanished from sight, yes, but the taste of salt spread out and pervaded the distilled water and would never go away. As with salt and water, so with life, and Tamara wanted desperately to tell her mother that although her life’s consciousness might someday flow out of herself back into the world, it could never be destroyed. But the practical Victoria One Ashtoreth was not interested in the metaphors or metaphysics of a four-year old. In a clear and cold voice, she bade Tamara clean up her mess. She told Tamara that it was time that she was taught cooking so that she might learn to be careful with valuable things. Thereafter, on each feast day when Tamara sat at table with her father and her twelve sisters and brothers, as punishment for her transgression, her mother never failed to thank her for helping to prepare the sacred kurmash that they ate. And with each bite of the faintly salted kurmash that her mother placed in her wide and beautiful mouth, Tamara thought of how she had carefully measured the salt water into the huge steel pot in which their family’s kurmash was always cooked. With each swallow of food that Victoria took, Tamara imagined that her mother was consuming Tamara’s love for her, for despite the anger between them, she never stopped loving her mother, and she always prepared the kurmash with infinite care. It was her secret hope that her infinite love would somehow infuse her mother and transform her into a kinder and wiser woman. But it never did. Her mother remained a parsimonious taskmaster who demanded strict adherence to recipes, and Tamara was never able to add enough salt water to the kurmash to flavour it fully.

  And she was never able to talk with her mother about love or death or any of life’s other mysteries. It was only years later that her mother finally explained that when a worthy astrier was on her deathbed, her mind was encoded as a program and stored within the electron flows of their church’s vastening computers. The human mind, her mother said, was a kind of program that could be preserved almost forever this way. Therefore Tamara must continually cleanse herself of evil thoughts and negative programs lest she be found unworthy of this cybernetic heaven and the church elders denied her the grace of vastening. She must continually strive for perfection in her life, her mother told her, or at the end of her life she would have no more life, never again – only blackness, nothingness, neverness. But Tamara remembered very well the day she had clanked jars and spilled salt water on the floor of her mother’s kitchen. After this, she never trusted anything her mother said, nor did she ever accept any of the doctrines of her church. Somewhere inside her was a deep knowledge that she could never die, even when her heart was pounding inside her chest and she was close to dying – even when she was terrified of death.

  ‘Oh, Danlo, Danlo!’ Suddenly, she cried out these three words as she lay on the floor of her meditation room. Her fists were clenched, and her whole body trembled as with terrible cold. Her eyes were tightly closed as she whispered, ‘No, no – I can’t!’

  ‘Shhh, be quiet now,’ Danlo said. He sat beside her massaging her temples, touching her eyelids. ‘Just … remember.’

  Gradually, the tremors tearing through Tamara’s body subsided. She fell still and utterly silent as she descended down through memories that Danlo could only guess at. Except for her slow, deep breathing, she might have been dead. Once, for a few moments, her breathing stopped altogether, and then despite himself, Danlo began to worry. He placed his hand between her breasts; he worried that her heart was now beating as slowly as the heart of a hibernating snow hare. For a long time he sat this way, feeling the faint thumping of blood beneath his hand. He listened to the sound of the sea beating in waves against the beach outside the house. He listened for the beating of his own heart and his own memories, and he was sure that Tamara had never told him anything about the first years of her life. If this almost-dead Tamara was now remembering anything at all, it could only be memories that the Entity had imprinted in her. He wondered what strange memories these might be. He was willing to share any of her memories, no matter how false or painful, but the great ocean of remembrance is a private universe in which it is almost impossible for anyone other than the remembrancer herself to live. Danlo was not a god, and so he could not look into the image storm that must be boiling through her mind. According to his criteria and almost impossible ideals, he was not even a full man, let alone what he conceived of as a true human being, and so all he could do was to sit and watch and wait for Tamara to reach her moment.

  Tamara, Tamara – you were never really born, he thought. What must it be like to remember your birth?

  Sometime in that long and timeless night, as Danlo kept watch over Tamara, there came the moment that he had been waiting for. Without warning, Tamara began to whisper, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes!’ Only her lips moved; she kept her eyes shut, and the rest of her body was as motionless as a corpse. She repeated this word again and again. Danlo supposed that she was remembering the truth about herself and finally making sense of her memories. And then, suddenly, she screamed. Her arms pulled up over her face, and her fingers clawed the air as her mouth opened in agony. She shook her head from side to side with such violence that Danlo was afraid that she might dislocate her neck. This terrible scream broke long and deep from her chest, and it seemed to go on and on forever. Although Danlo tried to keep Tamara from banging her head on the floor or injuring him with her long fingernails, a terrible power had come into her. The sudden strength running through her arms and body shocked him. In a convulsion of muscle and nerves, Tamara came awake and threw Danlo off her. She sprang to her feet sweating and shaking and still screaming as if some invisible hand had grabbed her body and plunged her into a cauldron of molten iron. When Danlo came closer to help her, she shook her head to warn him away. But Danlo misinterpreted this motion as only that of an uncontrollable frenzy. He tried to touch her face, to cool her momentary madness. And then, with all the ferocity and merciless precision of a warrior-poet, she drove the heel of her hand into the soft space beneath his ribs, beneath his heart. The force of the blow knocked him to the floor. He lay against the hard wooden tiles gasping for breath. Tamara stopped screaming then. She stood looking down at him, and her eyes were wide open and full of light.

  ‘No, no,’ she said softly, almost to herself.

  She looked around the room, drinking in the sight of the floor cushions, the hanging plants, the shatterwood beams glistening above her head. There was an apprehension about her, a terrible awareness as if she were seeing herself in these familiar objects an
d reliving the first time that she had opened her eyes upon this room. And in this moment of awakening, she must have known that there was something other about the whole house, something more. It must have been as if the doorways connecting the rooms of this mysterious house were like doorways to other dwellings in other places, faraway in space and time. There was starlight in Tamara’s lovely eyes, and memories, and sadness, too, for suddenly she shook her head back and forth and murmured, ‘Oh, no!’ She looked at Danlo, who was now up on one knee as he fought to breathe and stand up to face her. And then she ran from the house. She fled outside, down to the ocean where the starry sky opened like a million doors upon the many-roomed mansion of the universe.